Ryan: I haven't dropped Obamacare

Rep. Paul Ryan on Wednesday insisted that he wasn’t giving up the fight against Obamacare as he defended an op-ed he wrote that proposed a solution to end the stalemate in Washington without mentioning the health care law.

The day the op-ed touched off blowback from conservatives, the Wisconsin Republican told radio host Bill Bennett that even though he didn’t mention Obamacare in his piece in the Wall Street Journal he still sees it as part of his reform proposal because it is an “entitlement.”

Story Continued Below

“Are you putting Obamacare to the side?” Bennett asked Ryan on his show Wednesday morning.

“No,” the congressman replied. “Obamacare’s an entitlement just like any other entitlement. So that, as far as we’re concerned, is in this conversation. Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, those are the big drivers of our debt. If you look in the op-ed, I say we have to — ultimately we have to rethink all of our nation’s healthcare laws.”

But, Ryan added, “I don’t know that within the next two weeks we have a viable strategy for actually repealing Obamacare, every piece of it.”

“We defunded it,” he said. “We passed a delay. We went after more of its pernicious effects. We’re going to keep going after Obamacare. I’m totally committed to dismantling this law because what we’re learning soon here is that’s it’s going to do so much damage to this country. Premiums are skyrocketing, people are losing the coverage they had, businesses are knocking people down less than 40 hours a week, it’s just terrible.”

In his op-ed piece on Wednesday, Ryan proposed a deal to “break the deadlock” in D.C., suggesting that “both sides should agree to common-sense reforms of the country’s entitlement programs and tax code.”

“This isn’t a grand bargain,” Ryan wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “For that, we need a complete rethinking of government’s approach to helping the most vulnerable, and a complete rethinking of government’s approach to health care. But right now, we need to find common ground. We need to open the federal government. We need to pay our bills today — and make sure we can pay our bills tomorrow.”

“So let’s negotiate an agreement to make modest reforms to entitlement programs and the tax code,” he wrote.

But Ryan left out one critical word from his piece — Obamacare — that sparked a backlash among many conservatives on Wednesday morning. Ryan, however, pushed back against the criticism during his appearance on Bennett’s show.

“We’re not saying stop going after Obamacare,” he said. “We’re saying add these other things to this list because we think they’re in this country’s interest, and by the way, in some of these instances, entitlement reform, I think the president might be willing to do this.”

And Ryan noted that on the Hill, “We don’t have Democrats telling us, ‘Let’s go after Obamacare.’ But we have Democrats up here saying, ‘Let’s get debt reduction, let’s get entitlement reforms, let’s do these things we know will grow the economy.’”

No one is proposing a grand bargain because “a grand bargain to me is you get rid of Obamacare, you balance the budget, you pay off the debt. I don’t know that we’re going to get him to agree to that in a few weeks,” Ryan said.

But his op-ed piece did include things President Barack Obama may be willing to work together with Republicans on, Ryan said, and that common ground is now a main focus.

“I think the president, it’s in his interest to come to the table,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what, Dr. Bennett, we’re not going to walk away from this thing and give him just a clean debt limit increase without a solution in sight here.”